Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [67]
Nothing is known about the rectory at Elton in the thirteenth century, but some information has survived about other rectories, a handful of which, built in stone, still stand, though usually much altered. In size and characteristics the medieval parsonage evidently fell roughly between a manor house and a decent peasant house. That at Hale, Lincolnshire, was described as a hall house with two small bedchambers, one for residents and one for visitors, and a separate kitchen, bakehouse, and brewhouse.25 When the monks of Eynsham Abbey built a vicarage in 1268 for a church they had appropriated, they specified construction of oak timbers and a hall twenty-six feet by twenty with a buttery at one end and at the other a chamber and a privy.26 Like any other farmhouse, the rectory or vicarage included barns, pens, and sheds.
Records mention several persons assisting the rector or vicar in his professional work and daily life—chaplain, curate, clerk, page—without disclosing whether these were full- or part-time aides, or how they were compensated. Not infrequently there was also a wife or concubine. Clerical celibacy was a medieval ideal more often expressed than honored. Although two Lateran councils in the twelfth century prescribed it, a modern canon-law authority comments that in the thirteenth century “everyone who entered the clergy made a vow of chastity but almost none observed it.”27 Gerald of Wales states that “nearly all” English priests were married, though other sources indicate that only a minority were.28 Concubinage, usually entirely open, was more common. Robert Manning tells the tale of a woman who lived with a “right amorous priest” for many years and bore him four sons, three of whom became priests, the fourth a scholar. After their father died, the four sons urged the mother to repent her “deadly sin.” The mother, however, declared that she would never repent “while I have you three priests to pray and chant for me and to bring me to bliss.” The mother died “sooner than she willed.” For three nights her sons sat by her body at the wake. On the first, at midnight, to their terror, “the bier began to quake.” On the second night it quaked again and suddenly a devil appeared, seized the corpse, and dragged it toward the door. The sons sprang up, carried it back, and tied it to the bier. On the third night at midnight a whole host of fiends invaded the house and
Took the body and the bier
With loathly cry that all might hear
And bore it forth none knows where,
Without end forevermore.
The scholar son then roamed the world advising women not to become “priests’ mares,” lest they suffer his mother’s fate.29
The Lanercost Chronicle relates a less cautionary story: a vicar’s concubine, learning that the bishop was coming to order her lover to give her up, set out with a basket of cakes, chickens, and eggs, and intercepted the bishop, who asked her where she was going. She replied, “I am taking these gifts to the bishop’s mistress who has lately been brought to bed.” The bishop, properly mortified, continued on his way to call on the vicar, but never mentioned mistresses or concubines.30
The importance of the parish church in the village scheme was permanently underlined by the rebuilding of nearly all of them in stone, a process that began in the late Anglo-Saxon period and was largely completed by the thirteenth century. Many medieval village churches survive today, in whole or, as in the case of Elton’s chancel arch, in part. In the smaller villages, the church often remained a single-cell building with one large room. In larger parishes, as at Elton, the church was often two-cell, the nave, where the congregation gathered, linked by an arched doorway to the chancel, where the altar stood and the liturgy was performed. Sometimes lateral chapels flanked the chancel, and side aisles were added to the nave.31
In 1287 Bishop Quinel of Exeter listed the minimum furnishing of a church: a silver or silver-gilt chalice;